Woman seated on a wooden dock with a black and grey tattoo sleeve running from her forearm up to her upper arm, with boats in the harbour behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey arm sleeve on a woman on a dock

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits barefoot on a weathered wooden dock with her long wavy blonde hair falling over her face and head. A dark black and grey tattoo covers her forearm and extends up toward the upper arm, with the design partly hidden by the angle of the pose. Boats moored in a harbour, trees and a clear sky fill the background, and black slides lie on the planks beside her.

Forearm Upper arm Sleeve Woman Boat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Denzil Hosken had kept the mooring book for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked for number fourteen. It sat beyond the breakwater, a black buoy with its chain gone green, and the boats swung around it as if it were a rock nobody bothered to name.

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Then in July a woman came down the slipway with her sandals in one hand and a rolled chart under her arm, asking whether fourteen was still let. She said her grandfather had kept the Teal there in 1962, and she wanted to see the name on the plate. Denzil fetched the old ledger, its spine cracked, and found the entry in his predecessor's careful hand: Teal, returned to sea, not to be re-let. Beside it, someone had written in pencil that the mooring fee was paid by standing order from an account in Bristol. Denzil had never once wondered who paid it.

He took her out at slack water in the grey tender, the harbour quiet except for gulls and the tick of halyards against masts. She leaned over the bow and put her palm flat on the buoy, and the chain shifted and rang once against the hull, a dull note that carried across the water to the pier.

That evening Denzil opened the ledger and wrote beneath the old entry, in his own square letters: Fourteen, let to the Teal. Then he closed the book, went to the window, and watched the buoy riding the last of the light.